1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a product design process, a product design apparatus, and a recording medium for storing a product design program. More particularly, the present invention relates to art for quickly and easily planning and developing, and rapidly getting to market with, a product or service embodying a product design concept that conveys a high degree of customer satisfaction, which is to say a high degree of market competitiveness, and that permits the true wants and needs for the product or service in question which are inherent in the “voice of the customer” to be appropriately reflected during the stages of product planning and design at which design specifications for new products are being defined based on various wants and needs of users for that product or service.
2. Description of the Background Art
In planning and development of products and services embodying new product design concepts, the “voice of the customer” (VOC) with regard to wants and needs for that product or service is normally sought through interviews, questionnaire-type surveys, and so forth targeting customers or end-users (both of which are hereinafter collectively referred to as “users”). In conventional product design, the proposition has been to develop products having design concepts and design specifications which faithfully incorporate the content of the raw VOCs without refinement or modification, this representing the wants and needs as collected from those users, and to get to market with such products as early as possible before the competition. Areas addressed in the VOCs but which cannot be implemented in product must be negotiated with the customer and appropriate adjustment carried out; what matters of course is performance relative to the competition, and it is possible to some extent to compensate for shortcomings through price, customer service, technical support, and so forth. In the interest of quickly getting to market with a product that will satisfy the user, there are many cases where it is in fact not possible to achieve the performance demanded by the user in the VOC despite the best efforts during design and planning to incorporate the VOC into product. As a result, windows for successful product entry on the market are frequently missed, and many products which could have been successful are not as well-received as they might otherwise have been.
Here, it has conventionally been the content of the raw VOCs as collected from the users which forms the basis for the design specifications that define the product on behalf of which so much effort is being expended. That is, the common belief has been that if the voice of the customer is not faithfully reflected in the design specifications of the product, the user will have no use for the product that is ultimately put on the market, resulting in a missed business opportunity for the manufacturer. For this reason, despite the substantial risks that this represents for product design and development, manufacturers have, in order to lead the competition, put their efforts into development of techniques to produce products wherein the VOCs gathered from users themselves constitute the product design constraints employed during product design.
However, conventional product design has had the following problems for which solutions are sought.
The raw VOC, coming as it does from the user and conventionally thought of as a blueprint for design specifications without the need for further refinement or modification, will often, (1) particularly in the case of high-volume users of current products, staff responsible for accounts of various manufacturers at parts suppliers, or the like, consist of comments which indicate particular desired values in the context of some specific implementation (e.g., “we would like the RISC chip to function at 200 MHz or better”) or comments which are easily understood within the constraints of current product (e.g., “it would be nice to have floating point processor capability and PCI—Peripheral Component Interconnect—interface capability”). For this reason, whatever new design concepts have been obtainable from such VOCs have reflected product concepts that were little more than linear extensions of current product, and it has only been possible to obtain product concepts for fixed implementations; i.e., product concepts within the general framework of current product specifications.
On the other hand, (2) particularly in the case of end-users, as comments often list what users would like to ideally see in the future and such VOCs frequently only have meaning at an extremely vague level (e.g., “make it print better”), it has not been possible to efficiently refine such vague VOCs into product design concepts in a way that would allow them to be linked to particular product specifications.
Moreover, when one approaches a user as mentioned above and solicits VOCs from the user in the form of interviews, questionnaire-type surveys, and the like, the user tends not to respond as naturally as he or she might, and it has not been possible to elicit the true wants and needs of the user for the product.
With conventional product planning, it has thus not been possible, based on raw VOCs as gathered from users—these having neither been refined nor modified—to obtain appropriate design concepts, and furthermore, despite incorporation of such raw VOCs into product concepts it has been extremely difficult to achieve a product having specifications capable of truly satisfying users. Accordingly, costs associated with planning and development of new products have increased, and it has moreover been extremely difficult to quickly get to market with a successful product having good market competitiveness.